Hanging with a jerk

In a perfect example of synchronicity, my favorite musicians and novelists usually espouse the same socio-political views that I cherish, fanning delusions that you are what you read or listen to and that to a certain degree, belief in the remote possibility that these cultural heroes of our youth could be our drinking buddies. After all, the recipe of friendship is almost complete - same-mindedness, shared trepidations of a world gone awry, harboring the same misgivings...

As I grew older, I became less and less convinced that an artist ought to be evaluated primarily for his political views. I've mentioned before I've been poked for reading works of known anti-Communists but would you throw out Dostoevsky, for instance, for being a defender of the patriarchal authority of the Tsar? How many writers have conjured images of women that are despicable, shall we boycott them? If we choose to read writers substantially for their politics, we will be shortchanging ourselves.

My first hard lesson was nothing short of traumatic. This musician was a favorite since college, I wrote a paper heralding his contribution to music. In short, he was in my altar of unabashed adoration. Later, I found out that he was a wife-beater. A wife-beater? How could someone capable of writing such profound thoughts be a monster? It was difficult to reconcile but reality bites. What was I to do? Throw away his CDs and declare him as a bad artist?

The artist does have a covenant to preserve the integrity of his work, continue to sharpen his craft either by reworking his themes, push boundaries, and discover new frontiers. How he treats his dogs is of secondary importance, but God forbid, no to animal cruelty. I mean, what do I care if my cultural heroes are misogynist, miserable bastards? Their body of work speak for themselves, never mind how they behave in private.

Rilke whose poems have been my prayers is another example. In a biography written by Ralph Freedman, he was described as: an anti-Semite, a coward, a psychic vampire, a crybaby. He was a son who refused to go to his dying father's bedside, a husband who exploited and abandoned his wife, a father who almost never saw his daughter and who even stole from a special fund for her education to pay for his first-class hotel rooms. He was a seducer of other men's wives, a pampered intellectual gigolo, and a virtual parody of the soulful artiste who deems himself superior to ordinary people because he is so tenderly sensitive, a delicate blossom easily punished by a passing breeze or sudden frost.

Clearly, Rilke was not a nice man. He was a con artist. And this jerk wrote this:

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willingto be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything... And I do.

Some non-jerks could not illuminate such as this. So I will take Rilke, jerk and all, any day of the week. Now, jerk off.